


depression etc.

by spacepuck



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Brotherhood, Brothers, Depression, Mental Health Issues, not a slash fic sorry haha
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-04-28
Updated: 2012-05-03
Packaged: 2017-11-04 10:55:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 8,361
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/393056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacepuck/pseuds/spacepuck
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Your name is Dave Strider, and you don't really like doing anything. You'd much rather sit in your room and do nothing all day. Oh, and sometimes you just want to die, but that's another story.<br/>-<br/>Your name is Bro Strider, and you've never been sure how to handle a kid. You've never been good at handling situations like bad dreams or tantrums or bad days. How the hell are you going to handle your little brother's mental issues that are completely out of your grasp?</p><p>[discontinued]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dave: Dislike everything.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> update 4/29/16: ok so i haven't worked on this thing in 4 years, and at this point i'm not going to finish it!! it's kind of cringe-worthy (to me) because it was just me venting some Bad Feelings when i was 16. so sorry if you want me to come back to this, but i won't :'( feel free to read and re-read this, though. i understand wanting some sad striders.
> 
> instead, i've started a new story! still dealing with bro & dave's relationship, but with less of my personal Bad Feelings getting in the way, more focused on an au i'm working on. which hopefully means that bro and dave are more in character than they are here. still sad striders. you can read it [ here ](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6564649/chapters/15020101)

Okay.

Your name is Dave Strider, and you don’t like doing anything. Your interests are few, and you hardly give the time to them to even call them interests. Sometimes you give another hour or two more to taking shitty photos or doodling in Paint or seeing how many ways you can die in your shitty video games than usual, but the occurrence was unusual. You just didn’t like doing anything with your time.

Likewise, you liked to stay in your room most days. You left it to go to school and to take a piss and get food and do other things but otherwise, you liked keeping yourself holed up. It wasn’t a safety feeling or anything, you just liked it there. 

So naturally you get annoyed when your Bro commands you to get to the roof for a strife. But you don’t let him know—he’d only get annoyed, like he does when you don’t give him everything you’ve got or when you pass out after a few blows on some days. You don’t let him know that you’re not feeling up to it, ever, and you don’t let him know if you’re feeling ill. Striders don’t complain, they don’t back down, they don’t do anything to give anyone the thought that they’re weak.

When he tosses you a sword and quickly disappears to the roof, you don’t grumble or show any outward sign of complaint. For all you know, he could still be watching your every move without him actually being there. 

You step into Texas’ strong summer heat, and already you can feel sweat circling around the shades John gave you a few years ago. You grip you’re the hilt of your sword, twisting it in your hand slowly, eyes scanning the area for Bro. 

He just barely makes himself known as he swings at your right side, and you dodge it by a tick, holding up your blade and defending yourself from the next onslaught of swings. And you do this for a while—dodging, deflecting, staying light on your toes, circling the roof backwards and sideways and never advancing on him but rather letting him swing at you. It pisses him off and you know it. His dark eyebrows crease in annoyance, and he presses against you, his blade a hair away from nicking your chin despite your effort to push it away with your sword, glaring straight through the protective shield of your shades. 

“Stop using fucking defense, wiseass.”

And then he pushes away, and he swings again, and you deflect again, and you finally try to hit him. You fail, of course; you’ve gotten a hit on him maybe five times ever, while he’s gotten probably five dozen on you. It’s not until you get pushed back near the edge of the roof that you’re able to catch him off guard for even an eighth of a second. While he’s busy trying to get you riled up, to get your heart going, to make you think, “this is it, I’m gonna fucking die I’m gonna fall off the edge of my own damn home”, you slip your hand away from your blade that’s pushing him away and clock him in the face with your fist. He just barely moves out of the way before you really hit him, but you figure you got a pretty good hit on his jaw as you watch him roll it for a second. This distraction gives you the time to slip away from the edge of the roof and attack his side, which he again dodges just before you can get a sure hit on him.

Suddenly, a feeling of sure defeat comes over you. As he advances, you just want this damn fighting to be over, and you know it won’t end unless you stop fighting and let him beat the shit out of you. And you realize that you’re fucking done and you don’t want to do this anymore and you just want to hole yourself up in your room for the rest of eternity just so you don’t have to deal with moving and breathing in the heavy heat and swinging and deflecting and watching Bro get angry because you’re not doing shit. 

You realize you’ve never felt so heavy before in your fucking life, and you just want it to be over. 

Bro advances on you, his eyebrows cross, jaw set tight. “What the hell are you stopping for?”

There isn’t an answer. Your heart pulses faster suddenly, and he comes closer and closer with that angry glare, but you don’t fucking move, don’t have the will to even pick up your sword and fight him off again. Anxiety begins to settle in, and you stumble back with your heavy legs sinking into the asphalt. You avert your eyes so you don’t have to look at him, and it’s harder to grip your sword in your sweaty palm, and you feel like sinking sinking sinking straight into the ground, a woozy feeling spreading over your head and shoulders. 

He’s close to you now, and he finally strikes your shoulder, and you stumble to the side, your knees like bricks as you fall onto them. You feel your sword fall away from your grasp, and it makes a light clattering sound.

Just let it end, just let it end.

But he doesn’t go further. He raises his hand, and you’re sure he’s about to smack the fucking life out of you. Because you’re not doing what he wants you to be doing, because you’re a weak fucking kid, because you’re a good for nothing prick that does nothing with his life and just wants to lay in bed and crumble and sleep and die and it’s getting so fucking hot why the fuck is it getting so fucking hot.

You feel yourself drop further, and the last noise you make is a dry hiss as he grabs the back of your collar, and it digs into your windpipe as you finally let yourself sink.

-

You wake up feeling like a shell.

As you breathe in, you nearly choke on how dry your mouth is, and you sit up straight and heave for a few moments, panicking, feeling your face heat and swell as you clamber out of bed. You stumble into the bathroom and turn the sink on, dipping your head under it and taking rapid gulps of water. You shake a little, as if your body had jumpstarted and went straight into overdrive, and you pull yourself away from the metallic tap water to breathe. 

You don’t recall ever coming inside, which was normal after a strife where you passed out like a pansy. Cupping water in your hands, you splash your face, rubbing around your cheeks and digging into the hollows of your eye sockets, reaching up to run your hands through your hair— _ow._

A sharp pain makes itself known by shooting through your right shoulder. Ah. You’d forgotten about that. You let your right arm drop back to your side and turn off the water before finally looking at yourself in the mirror. Your shades were gone—probably taken off prior to getting tossed into bed. You were paler than Kristen Stewart’s ass, and even the freckles that swarmed across the bridge of your nose and under your eyes disappeared under the sickening color. 

“You look like fucking shit.”

You slide your gaze in the mirror over to Bro leaning on the doorframe. He looks neither pissed off nor concerned. Just a blank stare behind some ridiculous shades.

“Uh-huh,” you reply, looking back at yourself. You were glad that your red eyes were so glazed over that even fear would seem like mere discontent. As he steps closer, you tense a little—you can suddenly imagine him bashing your head into the mirror, saying you could have done better, you could have been stronger, you shouldn’t have passed out like a fucking pansy. Your fingers grip the lip of the sink, and you look down at the drain, clenching and unclenching your jaw. For a minute, you anticipate the worse.

But when you look up again, he’s gone. A weight lifts off of you, and you hang your head to take in a long breath, shuddering. 

You leave the bathroom, checking the kitchen and living room, and you’re positive he’s not still around. You grab a tall glass and fill it with water and trudge back to your room, tripping over wires and mumbling curses. You reach to put the glass down, only to find three waters already sitting untouched on your cinderblock-supported desk beside your bed. You don’t recall seeing them there when you woke. Maybe Bro put them there before he left. Would’ve been surprising, considering he doesn’t seem to give much of a shit.

Settling the glass next to the others, you proceed to drop ungraciously onto your bed, sinking again, letting out a dry shudder as you rub at your heavy eyes and shove your lead-based legs under the blanket.

Never before did sleeping sound like such a good substitute for dying.


	2. Bro: Be a shitty guardian.

Not like you’ve done anything otherwise.

Your name is Bro Strider, and you’ve never been sure how to handle a kid. Bad dreams, tantrums, weird hormonal shit that you yourself have barely finished outgrowing, crying over nothing, and all those other things you were sure you would never have to deal with again bundled up in one growing person that knows how to handle all of their issues just as much as you do.

Dave was persistent in making your life a hell as a new parent ever since the beginning. Cried about everything, got himself into trouble, had persistent bad dreams as a kid and would always look for comfort that you weren’t positive you could completely provide. You supposed that if you got him to stop crying, you did a good job. Only took you two damn years to perfect comforting the kid before he went on to need a new level of it. 

And now, watching him disintegrate at his own hand, you don’t know what the hell to do to make him better. Despite your infrequent and odd hours of being home, you’ve watched the kid become more and more…gone, you suppose. It’s freaking you the fuck out. You begin to wish that the days of him yelling at you for no goddamn reason and being a smartass when he shouldn’t have been were back. Because you know how to handle that. Not this. You don’t know how to handle something that is hardly even there.

The kid passed out during strife yesterday, and your damn sure it’s because he didn’t eat or drink anything in a grand total of eighteen hours. You knew that when you told him to come up to the roof, and you anticipated him buckling and slipping to the ground before he even came up. You still fought him as you would have, without beating the shit out of him. What the fuck kind of older brother would you be if you beat the shit out of him while he was practically dying-

No. No, no, not dying. Your kid brother wasn’t dying. He was just being a stupid jackass that suddenly stopped taking care of himself. Besides, you did slice his shoulder open anyway, which you wrapped up. He probably wouldn’t even remember it.  
So while you dragged his skinny ass inside, feeling the new bones that suddenly seemed to bulge out of his skin more than they should have, you left him three glasses of water, each two cups worth. You expected them to be gone when you got back home, along with another glass that he would hopefully get on his own, but you knew you shouldn’t have set your expectations so high. 

You left soon after you dumped him onto his bed. Deciding to wander around the store a while, doing a little food shopping, you wondered if there was any magical supplement that would make him eat again. Or, you wished anyway—even if there were, he probably wouldn’t have taken it. He’d be a smartass and hide it under his tongue or behind his teeth, or just not take it at all. But you did pick up some vitamins anyway, and then went through your usual list: microwave dinners, protein powder, a case of Coke, milk, eggs, orange juice, apple juice…

You looked at the apple juice carton, with the weird happy apple on it, and held it in your leathered hand. Dave hadn’t even finished the last one, which had expired last Tuesday. Very unlike him to just leave his favorite drink to go to waste. Worrying, even.  
Still, you put it in your cart anyway, just in case. If he drank it, it was better than nothing. 

When you returned home, he was still asleep. You put the groceries away quietly, glancing over at his door from time to time, then decided that you didn’t have to freak out so damn much as long as he was still breathing.

Was he still breathing?

As you sat on the couch, watching some show you weren’t not paying attention to, you fidgeted and looked over your shoulder more times than necessary. 

_He’s fuckin’ fine_ , you told yourself, over and over and over again while you bobbed your knees and tapped your fingers against the back of the couch. _Stop acting like such a doting mother._

Your worries of your little bro being dead went invalidated as Dave suddenly crashed into the bathroom in a fit of dry coughs, choking on the water that spilled into his mouth from the sink. You flash-stepped over, leaning in the doorframe, trying to look as uninterested and unworried as possible as to not make him worried.  
The sight made the hairs on your neck stand on end. He looked past being sick. He looked fucking dead.

You had to leave again. You didn’t know what to do. You only knew that you couldn't look at that face. That wasn't your bro.

_You fucked up._

And now, a day later, you sit at home, waiting for his return from school, almost positive you’re going to get a call. You want to say it’s your paranoia that’s waiting for the school to tell you that Dave’s either fainted, sick, or dead, and that your sharp intuition has nothing to do with it, but you still sit in wait, stitching and re-stitching crooked seams on a purple Smuppet.

The ringing phone still makes your eyebrows jump regardless, and you swipe the phone from today’s spot on the couch, answering it.

“Strider,” is all you say. 

“Hello, Mr. Strider? This is Anne Holloway, the eleventh grade counselor,” this automatic-sounding voice says over the line, feigning deep concern. “Your child, Dave, is here, and we would like for you to come down if possible. If not, we would like to schedule a date to speak to you.”

This call wasn’t out of the ordinary. Dave had been called down to guidance and the principal’s office a million times since elementary school. But you still got up anyway, slipping on your sneakers and tugging on your cap. 

“I’ll be right down,” you say in return. And you hang up before she can say another automated word to you.

-

“I didn’t do fucking shit to that dickface. He’s the one that wanted to fucking start something.”

Being that it was near the end of the day when Dave was called down to guidance, you signed him out to take him home. He’s pissed off as is, so it didn’t hurt to go home early. Besides, the kid needs some talking to. What you’re going to say, however, is beyond you.

Dave was slouched down in the passenger’s seat of your truck, glaring out the window through his shades with his thin arms crossed along his chest. He looked positively grouchy, pissed, and uncool. 

“Calm the hell down, it’s just a detention,” you tell him, a little distracted. There wasn’t a reason to be angry; the other kid was probably a brat and deserved a kick or two to the face anyway. You switch lanes and turn onto your street.

Dave says nothing in return. He slouches a little further and begins untying and retying the frayed laces of his sneakers. You have never seen him do this before, and you wonder if it’s a habit he picked up without you noticing. You don’t ask, though. Probably nothing.

“You’re not actually going to go down and talk to them, are you?” he asks as you pull into the parking lot for the apartment complex. 

“Yeah I am, kiddo,” you reply, and before you can even get out of the car, he grabs your wrist. The grasp is a little weak, but it grabs you attention. You look at him, raising a dark brow. “What?”

“Don’t you fucking dare. They’re all liars and scumbags and they get paid to get people in trouble.” His voice is direct, but you swear you can hear a hint of pleading behind it.

You roll your eyes. “You got yourself into trouble, bro. They just want to chat with me, and that’s it.”

You feel his hand fall off your wrist, and he shrugs his seatbelt off, quickly getting out of the car. You follow suit, watching him trudge up the metal stairways.

As you watch, you count the number of bones that show through his shirt. It makes you cringe, and you pray to the nonexistent being in the sky that you can talk to him without fucking up like usual. Especially since he's been so on edge recently.

Once you get to the apartment, you close the door behind you. He’s already making his way to his room, lazily kicking off his sneakers and walking over wires.

You take a breath.

“Dave.”

He stops and turns to you. He tries to hide his posture, but it's difficult to hide bones, so you watch his arms tense up a little. "What?" he asks, trying to sound snotty. You jut a thumb over to the couch, voice unwavering.

“Sit down.”

He stares at you for a long while. Finally, he changes his path and moves away your Smuppet equipment aside before sitting on the couch. You make your way around and stand in front of him, arms crossed, mouth set tight.

_Don't fuck up, Strider._


	3. Dave: Feel cornered.

All you ever feel is cornered around Bro.

You sit down on the couch uncomfortably, looking straight ahead at the television as Bro walks around to stand in front of you. You aren’t sure why he walked so slowly, or why he’s insisting on talking. He doesn’t like doing either of those things if there isn’t a reason to.

You swallow dryly. Something’s not right. As you avert your gaze from looking straight at him, you try not to fidget in front of him. Is he going to yell? Is he still pissed about yesterday? Oh god, you thought you were off the hook, he didn’t yell at you yesterday, but maybe it was out of spite, maybe he felt almost bad because you were a stupid fuck and didn’t eat or drink anything for over a day, shit, now that you’re feeling alright he’s gonna lay it on you and _fuck-_

“Yo.”

Your eyes flick over to his, and you realize that the hands on your knees were squeezing. You relax them quickly, even though it doesn’t matter. He noticed already. He must have noticed you not paying any attention to him. You hope he didn’t notice that you were internally freaking out. 

How uncool.

You swallow, noticing the slight dryness in your throat. “What?” you ask. 

He pauses, and you can see his arms relax a little, then tense again. He releases a heavy sigh, then removes his cap, running a large hand through his hair. He sits down across from you on the table, moving aside some Game Bro magazines and puppet materials. His elbows rest on his knees, and he rests his mouth against his intertwined hands. You feel uneasy now that your eyes are at the same level as his.

It’s uncomfortably quiet for a few moments. At this distance, he can see the direction of your eyes, and you know this because you can faintly see the vibrant orange of his irises through both yours and his shades, so you try to be strong and look right at him. However, he himself seems to be drifting in and out of concentration, despite looking straight at you. He’s hesitating.

He bows his head to run his hands over his hair again. You look down at your lap in this moment, chewing on your lip nervously. Is he trying to trick you? What, is he searching your damn soul to find your weaknesses? You pick at a loose thread that hangs from a hole in your jeans, twisting it around the tip of your finger, watching it turn red, then purple, then releasing it from the bind and doing it again. 

Bro sighs again, but this time sounding ready to talk. You move your eyes to look up at him, but keep your head bowed, your finger twirling around the thread.

“Are you alright, kid?” he finally asks, picking up his head. 

What? 

Is that what he wanted to ask? He doesn’t want to beat the living daylights out of you or yell at you until he’s chewed out every single piece of your body? He wants to know if you’re _alright_? Alright with what? Today? Life? Your feelings?

You aren’t sure how to react for a moment. You realize he hasn’t asked you that question since you were a little kid, when you’d cry out of pain or wake up in the middle of the night for whatever reason. And when he’d ask, it was all emotion-related. “Are you alright? It was just a bad dream, don’t freak out” or “Are you okay? Geez, you banged yourself up pretty bad this time.”

What the hell brought on that question, then? You’re fine. You’re fuckin’ dandy.

But you find the will to shrug your shoulders, feeling the light pang of pain from the slow-healing wound on your shoulder. You feel your bones crackle softly, and you roll your neck. 

“Sure.”

He falls silent for a moment. You can tell this is awkward for him, yet his gaze is stern and calculating.

“Really,” he says, unquestioning, sarcastic almost. “Because you’ve been acting fucking weird lately.”

You pick you head up to look at him, brow raised, the corner of your mouth twisted up in a small smirk. “You always say I act fucking weird, bro.”

His shoulders drop a little. He’s wholly unamused. “Because you do, you shit. But you know what I mean.”

You sit back against the couch, rolling your shoulders against it. Your smile drops. “No I don’t.”

“Dave.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about-”

Suddenly, he reaches forward and lightly grabs your wrist. You flinch a little instinctively, not expecting him to do that. He’s able to grab your skinny wrist with three of his fingers. He raises your arm, and you look at it. It’s just your arm: pale, dusted with light freckles, the dark birthmark cradled on the inside of your elbow. You look back at him. 

“What?”

“This,” he says, shaking your arm a little, “isn’t normal.”

“Yo, man, I get that my birthmark is weird, but-”

“Dave, stop being a fucking smartass and tell me what the hell is going on.”

You insides clench at the sternness of his voice, and you feel your face fall completely. You look at your arm again, a thin thing with a knobby elbow, leading up to your large, slender hand with knobby, long fingers. You look at him again.

“Are you judging my arm, bro?”

His jaw clenches, and you watch his eyebrows cross downward as he glares.

“ _David Strider._ ”

You flinch a little. He looks absolutely angry now as his grip on your wrist tightens, enveloping it with his entire hand. He’s never called you by your full name, not even when you fucked up as a little kid.

Your heart rattles your ribcage. You feel yourself shrink back into the couch. A helpless little voice slip out of you, out of your control.

“Stop.”

“Stop _what_. I’m not doing shit, just trying to figure out what the fuck you’re doing to yourself.”

“I’m not doing _anything-_ ”

He’s suddenly pointing a finger at you, half-rising from his seated position.

“Exactly, Dave! You’re fucking yourself up because you suddenly forgot how to fucking take care of yourself!”

Your heart is panicking, and you gulp dryly. You’ve forgotten what he sounds like when he’s angry. You’ve imagined it every day, but you could never compare it to real life. His deep voice, clear and heavy, hardly surpasses his normal volume, which makes it all worse. You try to tug your wrist away, but he doesn’t let go. He’s on fire. He wants to make a point.

“No, you fucking stay here,” he says to you, still pointing his finger at you, holding onto your wrist. “And you listen to me: you have to start taking fucking care of yourself. I don’t know what the hell your goddamn problem is, but _this-_ ,” he gestures to your entire body, “-is not going to fucking cut it. You’re passing out from dehydration, you’re losing muscle, you’re fucking _bones_ , Dave. I don’t know why you’re deliberately fucking yourself up, but whatever the reason is, _cut it the fuck out._ ”

He finally drops your wrist and stands up entirely. You’re frozen in your spot as he towers over you. He opens his mouth to say more, but then quickly closes it, finding nothing else to say. However, he gives you one more disappointed, angry glare before disappearing. You hear the apartment door click open and closed, and then silence. 

_Oh my god._

You feel like you’re sinking again, eyes wide open.

 _Oh my_ fucking _god-_

Your heart races quicker as you scramble to your feet. You stumble to your room, covering your mouth.

 _You worthless piece of fucking shit, what the fuck is_ wrong _with you?_

You slam your bedroom door closed behind you and you just feel heavy and hot and panicked.

 _He hates you he hates you he left because he’s so fucking_ sick _of you._

You stand in the middle of your room, feeling your blood pulse through you, rattle your veins and quake your limbs, and you sway. You then reach over, knocking your fan away from your closet door, flinching as the metal hits the floor. You begin shoving things out of your closet – the bottles of chemicals for your photography, the trays, empty boxes, empty apple juice containers, things you don’t remember ever putting in there. You crawl into the small space you’ve made, and you sit against your closet’s wall, grabbing a sweatshirt from a hanger and pressing it against your face.

And you scream. 

And you can feel the last shreds of your dignity rip from your core and leave alongside your voice.


	4. Bro: Abscond

You had to.

You knew you would fuck up. Who the hell were you fooling, trying to have a normal conversation with a seventeen year-old kid that obviously has some fucking issues, trying to get him to talk. You’re not a goddamn therapist. You’re just a shitty guardian.

You didn’t go far—just outside of the building, sitting on the hood of your truck. Your lips cradle a cigarette, and you hate the small taste of it, and you hate the smell. Smoking wasn’t a reoccurring habit, nor was it an addiction. It was just a tool you used to keep from beating the shit out of someone that didn’t deserve it.

That was one of your fears, if you could call it that. Beating the shit out of Dave outside of a strife. The fact that you even had to fear it made you feel like the worst guardian on the planet. The fact that you were afraid that you were going to beat up your kid brother out of anger made you want to lose your privileges as a parent. Because it was wrong that you even had the thought of it. So fucking wrong.

You’re such a fucking dick.

When you were yelling at him, when his full name had slipped from your mouth, you watched as Dave tensed up and shrank back. Your closeness to him, marked only by the space between the couch and the table, permitted you to see his eyes. Behind his shades, they were wide, round, bugging out in what you knew was fear that you induced. You have no idea if your words got through to him, or if he was preoccupied with feeling anxious and afraid. How the hell do seventeen year-olds even work—do they respond to fear? Or do they hate you until they can’t remember their fears in the first place?

And then you remember. When you were seventeen, you were a goddamn parent already. You were scared shitless, and you still are sometimes. You wanted to give up on the kid and put him in adoption, and you almost did at one point, if it weren’t for the fact that you knew your place and your duties. Dave was yours to provide for and raise. He was yours to teach how to fight and defend himself. And you knew the adoption agency was a shithole anyway, and what kind of person would you be if you subjected him to that?

Yeah, you were scared. But you pushed through. Except now he probably hates you, because seventeen year-olds hate everything. Especially yours.

Whatever the case, you scared him, and you left because you didn’t want to beat his face in. Although you hate its smell and taste, the cigarette left you feeling calmer, and you can commend it for doing that much for you. As you exhale the last puff of bitter smoke, you look up at your apartment, the top of the building. You have no idea what Dave’s doing. Maybe he shrugged you off and is playing video games, or he’s back in his room and talking to his friends or making his (you admit, hilarious) shitty comics. Probably not the case. At this point, you hope he’s not trying to suffocate himself or set himself on fire.

You drop the cigarette and slide off of the hood of your truck, rubbing your shoe into the butt to extinguish the tiny embers. You figure you might as well make sure that he’s not doing something stupid. Like trying to kill himself.

The thought makes your heart pick up speed by a few beats, and you go back into the building. You flash-step up the stairs, and fifty-five stories later, you reach your apartment door, a battered thing. 

Quietly, you open it and peer in. You cross “setting self on fire” off from the list. 

Stepping in and nudging the door closed behind you with your foot, you hear a rattling sound from further inside your home. It sounds like something scratching against the wall. Listening closer, you can tell it’s from Dave’s room. In an instant, your brain makes up about ten different scenarios, ways that he could possibly hurt himself in there.

_Relax, Dirk. You can fucking do this. He’s not trying to off himself and you can fucking handle your own kid. He’s not a fucking idiot. He’s not that upset over it._

_Calm the fuck down._

But even now, you find yourself knocking on his door, your knuckles hardly hitting the wood. The noise stops, and you expect him to answer, to open the door looking bored as ever and wondering why the hell you’re knocking on his door because you never do.

However, there’s nothing after that. You swallow, leaning against the doorframe, ear just barely touching his door.

“Dave?” you call, voice just loud enough to reach into his room. You hear another door close, his closet. You slump a little, and you don’t care that the posture is vulnerable, because there’s no one around to see your pathetic state. “Dave, look, man…”

You sigh. He probably isn’t able to hear you through two doors. After five seconds of speculation, you open his door and look into his room, and instantly you notice that the majority of the contents that occupy his closet are on the floor, along with his fan. You set it up-right again and move some of the stuff from his closet to clear a spot on the floor. You sit down in front of his closet door, a black sliding thing that was a bitch to install. 

A slow breath enters you, and you release it, removing your cap and setting it to your side. You drop your shades in it. Maybe he’ll take you seriously if he can actually see your fucking face. That is, if he comes out.

“Dave,” you say again, but don’t stop to wait for a response. “Look, I’m…fuck, bro, I’m sorry.”

The words tasted foreign in your mouth. You fidget slightly, playing with the snaps of your gloves.

“I’m sorry, alright? I don’t know what the hell I was expecting, but…I fucked up, alright?”

You hoped you weren’t fucking up again. You clear your throat of nothing, and your voice drops a little in volume. You feel awkward, talking to him like this.

“I just want to make sure you’re alright.”

Okay, now you’re crossing into Worried Mother territory. You sit in silence for a while, pushing back your cuticles, snapping your gloves, doing anything to fill the quiet. It’s almost like he’s not even in there. You swallow dryly again. 

You can just barely hear him breathing. He’s trying so hard to pretend he’s just not there. He probably wants you so badly to leave him be. At least he’s practicing that. A tiny smirk tugs at the corner of your mouth.

“Dave, if you’re dead, I swear—”

A rustle. You straighten slightly from your hunched position. The latch thuds against the door gently, and he slides the door open with his foot. He looks at you from his spot in the corner of his closet, just hardly lit up by some light sneaking in, and he looks positively gone. You lean a little to the right to look at him, your right elbow resting on your right knee, face resting in your hand. Your smirk, as small as it was, has dropped. 

He reminds you of a dead body. Pale, greyed by the shadow, thin and knobby with zero expression. It takes all you have to keep your eyes directly on his shades, now that he can see your eyes.

“What do you want?” he asks through a thick layer of hoarseness. Your eyebrow rises.

“The hell happened to your voice?”

He looks at his sweatshirt for a second, then back at you. He shrugs. You internally cringe, watching his shoulders pop out dramatically through his shirt.

“Nothing.”

You sigh, tilting your head down to run your hand over your hair. If you keep it up, you’re going to end up bald before you’re forty.

“Uh-huh,” you reply, not up for arguing with him. It wasn’t a big deal. It was just his voice, it’d be back. “Listen, we’re going out to eat. Your pick.”

He stares at you. You stare back, vulnerable without your shades. After a long pause, you roll your eyes, sighing.

“Think of it as an apology present, kid.”

This produces a small snort from him, and the first smile you’ve seen from him all week, however faint it is. 

“A fuckin’ apology present.”

A faint smile replaces your tight-set mouth. “Yeah.”

He goes quiet again, shifting his position, bones jutting out this way and that. He ponders his choices for a while, and you can tell because he tugs on the blond hairs of his fringe when he’s in thought. The two of you were going to be bald in a few year’s time with your habits.

Finally, he stops tugging, and he gets to his feet. He emerges from the closet (you swallow back a gay joke) and stretches, cracking his back and shoulders, rolling his neck. “I wanna go to fuckin’ Friendly’s,” he says, voice just hardly going above a whisper. 

You nod, getting up and tugging your hat back on, shades finding their place back on your face. “Deal. Maybe it’ll fix your shitty voice.”

He lands a weak, half-assed punch on your shoulder as he passes you. “Dick.”

You land a heavy flick to the back of his head, and he flinches, turning to you to try and land a weak slap on your face. He smiles, even as you shove his hand away.

You’re glad to see that rare smile again.


	5. Dave: Be okay.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, thank you guys for the kudos and kind comments. <3 Managed to get this next chapter up!

But how?

As you sit alone in your room, at your desk, staring at your unanswered Pesterchum chats, you wonder how a person can just be okay. How do people live on, knowing they’re ignored, disliked, fucking up and screwing over? How are they able to live on in a world that hardly even knows they’re there? With billions of people, no one person can be so important, nobody’s really important. The dead hardly go down in history, and when they do, it’s forgotten within a century’s time.

So who’s to say you’ll even be remembered? Who’s to say you really matter right now, in this moment?

No one. Because nobody’s home, and nobody’s online, and no one’s around to pay you any attention. No one can tell you that you matter, because you’re the only person in this house.

You roll away from your desk in your chair, turning it so you can stand up and immediately faceplant onto your bed. Your body hurts lately, although you’ve been eating considerably more ever since last week. But you guess it’s time to man up and suck it the hell up through that bendy straw, take it like a man, etc. etc.

You tell yourself this as you curl up under your blanket, chilly even in the regular 85 degrees of Texas heat. A large, nearly full apple juice container sits beside your bed, and you lift it up, wrist a little wobbly from the weight, and sit up enough to take a long sip from it. You cap it and set it down with a large plastic _thunk_ back on your floor, then promptly return under the haven of your blanket.

You’ve spent much of your time in bed, you realize, and not even the cool kind—you just lay there and think or sleep. You’ve never even had sex, much less have it on your own bed. Sex would be great, sure, and you’re sometimes jealous of Bro on the rare nights that he brings home a lady friend with benefits (and, on a few occasions, a dude friend, although you don’t think you’re into guys), and through your thin walls you can hear just how great it must feel. And while you listen, you can’t help but feel miserably alone.

There was a time when you actually went outside on a regular basis, but that seemed to change as you passed the threshold of adolescence. You turned thirteen, your best friends insisted on this game you didn’t even want to play, and…

You hardly even remember the passing of time between when you were thirteen and sixteen. In fact, you hardly even remember what had happened. Bro told you that you were basically a zombie and you nearly failed right out of school, but you can’t recall ever being home or going to school.

Some nights, though, you feel a shock run through your body right after you see flashes of color or alien people, or your friends on death beds and wearing hooded cloaks, a bright green sun, a land of red and fire, a terrible scratch, and it wakes you up in a panic. You can’t recall the visions themselves, but you had been bothered enough to scribble your sightings on your wall right after jolting awake on a few nights.

John, Rose, and Jade have also experienced these things, but less frequently than you. Maybe it had to do with the incessant ticking in your head since you “came back to earth”, as Bro called it. Maybe it had to something to do with time.

You did get an eerie feeling thinking about time. It made your blood pump a little harder. Made your head swell. You didn’t like it.

Turning over on your bed, you look at the wall where your hardly coherent scribblings sit, hardly above your mattress. The notes are sloppy, yet there are clear penciled-in dates beside them from the mornings after. So far, there have been fifteen of them over the span of nine months. You haven’t had one in about three weeks.

Bro has seen the notes, of course. He never questioned you about them, but you recall telling him that you were possessed by the dark lord Satan and that he should buy enough salt to secure the perimeters of your apartment. You arrived home from school the next day to your home covered in candles and salt circles while Bro locked you in your room, chanting to the gods outside of your chalk-covered door. Needless to say, he didn’t let you sleep that night.

You roll so you lay on your back again, staring at the ceiling. You suppose you could trudge over to the other side of your room create some beats, but, likewise to your feeling over the past few months, you don’t feel like it. Jade has been impatient with waiting for the newest DJ Strider beat, but she’s seemed to have backed off as you respond with the same “I’ll get to it” every time she brings it up. In fact, you’ve hardly talked to her over the past couple weeks…

She’s not even online, you remember before you nearly drag yourself out of bed to check. You left all of them multiple messages, always feeling like you’re annoying them, but you haven’t heard the usual ping of their responses. It almost makes you feel like they’ve got more important shit going on, that they’re just not able to talk as much.

If they’re so busy, then why are you still sitting around alone, doing nothing important with your life like they probably are?

_Because you’re not important enough to do important things._

The answer comes to you like a whip. You sigh and sit up in your bed, the goosebumps flooding back to your bare arms as the air hits them, and you look around your room. Your photography trays still sit beside your window, dusted with dried up chemicals that sit in containers in your closet. You don’t remember the last time you processed any film. You don’t even remember the last time you purchased film, or took a picture. Your camera sits beside the enlarger on your desk, and you slouch back and sigh. You’d be surprised if you even remembered how to use half the shit you own.

However, you can feel your stagnant turntables calling for you, begging to have Dave Strider’s fingers on their buttons again, and you slump out of bed over to it. You push against one of the discs, and you feel calmed by how nicely it still turns. You pick up your headphones, blocking out all outside noises, and switch the set on.

You instantly wonder how you didn’t miss doing this over the past few months. Eyes closed, you maneuver around your turntables easily, doing some shaky warm up tunes, and then comfortably sliding into full-blow sick beats.

This is the first time in a while that you’ve felt like you were actually alive. Mentally awake, physically light and strong and so full of peace. The constant ticking in your head is drowned out by the music blasting into your ears.

Time flies by. Or rather, you go on without it. For once, you feel untouched by its hands.

By the time you open your eyes (and quickly realize you never put on your shades), you’ve created two fresh beats, ready for transfer and download. You slide back into your computer chair and select the program you use for transferring, then sit back and wait. And then you swiftly sit forward again in seeing that someone had replied to your long-winded chat with yourself on Pesterchum.

EB: jesus christ, dave!

EB: i thought you were some shitty spambot and almost blocked you.

EB: are you okay? you sound like you’re in peril.

EB: do i need to swoop down and save you?

EB: my damsel in distress? princess dave?

EB: dave? helloooo??

TG: dont get your panties in a square knot egbert

TG: im here

TG: stuck in this tower

EB: let down your hair, then fling it over about four or five states.

EB: i’ll save you dude!

TG: fuck man, i chopped it all off when i became a lesbian

EB: shit, dude. you didn’t save a few locks for me?

TG: nah man

TG: i threw away those locks once i came out of the closet

TG: ba dun ching

EB: hahaha, alright.

EB: but are you okay, though?

EB: sorry that i haven’t been around, been so busy with school…

Just as you suspected.

TG: nah bro its fine

TG: just been a little weird lately no big

EB: weird?

Why were you telling him this. You were not supposed to open up about this shit.

Abort mission abort mission abort abort abort.

TG: yeah man

TG: i just feel like theres pressure in my lower regions all the time

EB: uhhh…

TG: am i pregnant john

TG: did you touch my weiner

TG: implant your seed within me

EB: haha, fuck you dude!

Mission aborted.

You talk to him for a while and send him the music files, until he has to run off to some tutoring place so he can teach kids basic math. He’s not even that great at math, but you guess anyone that can count up to 100 and is able to discern a triangle from a dog is applicable to the job.

Looking at the time, Rose likely wouldn’t be on for a few more hours, and Jade comes on at random times as it is, so you send them the files anyway just in case you don’t catch them. And then you’re back to staring at your walls, unsure of what to do.

You leave your room to waltz about the rest of your home. You grab some crackers and munch on them as you wander, on your toes just in case you don’t hear Bro arrive. Another hour passes by and there’s still no sign of him. Not unusual, but a little odd considering he’s seems keen on keeping you a little company lately…

You play video games well into the night, shoving your shades back on when your eyes begin to hurt as the day becomes night and the television screen appears to be brighter. Three hours later, he still hasn’t returned, and this leaves you with a prickly feeling. You remind yourself that there were times where he didn’t return home for days, only saying he had business to take care of as if to ease your nerves of what had happened (although you would never let him know that you were remotely nervous about the idea of him abandoning you), and that this may be one of those times. _Let it be_ , you tell yourself as you realize you’re fidgeting with your hair at the thought. _It’s not the end of the world._

Sometime during your gameplay, you slip into sleep on the couch, but you only fall onto the level of being slightly awake as well as sleeping. Although this happens sometimes, and you’d often prefer it as it makes it easier to wake up from a fucked up dream, you’d much rather be in a deep sleep. You feel like you haven’t actually slept in weeks.

As you lay there, an only slightly conscious being, you stir awake as a noise pulls you away from your nothing dream. You squint at the time: 5:06 a.m. With a grunt, you sit up partially, expecting to see that something in the kitchen fell over a little, or the people below you were doing some weird shit, but instead you’re met with a person trudging through the kitchen. After a moment of startle, you realize that this person is Bro. He catches you staring at him, even with his broad back turned, and he looks at you.

Even though you can hardly see through the dark, you can tell he’s weary and unpleased. You wonder for a second if it’s your fault he’s like this, if you had something to contribute to this behavior, but the thought goes away as he tiredly ruffles your hair and tells you to go back to sleep in a rumbly, thick voice. You suspect he’s drunk. Maybe a little high? You didn’t smell anything, though, so maybe he’s just piss-tired. Maybe he really did have a lot of work to do, work he’ll never confide in telling you.

Whatever it is, you sense that something isn’t right. Maybe a little something. Could be a big something. The way he pat your head felt weird…was his glove off? Why the hell did he do that, anyway, and since when?

You don’t slip into sleep until long after he’s gone into his room, meanwhile wondering these things to yourself as you stare at the large television’s screensaver, watching the logo bounce back and forth, back and forth, back and forth…


End file.
